The dawning days of December, and the deep cold of winter has already descended.
Here at Red Willow, the mercury struggles in the early hours, the earth unwilling to rise from slumber to meet the cold morning light. Late afternoon, and the temperatures drop as fast as Father Sun before a sky set aflame one last time before dark. On this day, moon and morning star arced across a clear cobalt sky to the southeast, stretching westward like the tail of an icy comet toward a scattering of smaller, more distant diamonds of the dawn. The sun is not yet risen here, although by now its glow has washed the sky in the pale watercolors of the season.
These are the hard days, when the air is as cold and the wind as sharp as any frozen blade, the days increasingly short as the nights grow long in a deeper dark, when it is all the sun can do to make its daily journey across the sky. We live now in the low light of winter, and our small world seems cold and forbidding indeed.
But that same low light that gives us precious little warmth and fewer hours warding off the dark also gives us something more: the gift of a near-unearthly beauty impossible to find save in these days otherwise so bitterly, brutally short.
Wings captured the images in this series, only three of which appear today, nearly six years ago and a month hence: New Year’s Day of 2013. It was the opposite hour, as well, sunset rather than -rise, the ethereal rose and amber glow appearing in the west rather than behind the eastern peaks. But the imagery holds for both bookends to the winter’s day here.
And this year, once again, the season holds out the hope of snowfire.
It’s a phenomenon not uncommon to this region — or, rather, it used to be not uncommon. In recent years, real snow has been as scarce as the rain this summer past, its falls few and far between, melting as fast as it arrives, or departing within hours beneath the gaze of a too-warm sun.
Such are the wages of climate change, and we all perforce pay them now.
But six years ago, snow in winter was still the ordinary way of things here, cold and deep and long-lived. It was the sort of snow strong enough to share space with the sun, and during a storm, dawn and dusk often became moments of pure alchemical magic: amber light, rose air, dusky crystals piled a foot deep and more in the faded or fading light — a world on fire in the sub-zero cold, the red willow of its name now extending whole and entire to our surroundings.
Perhaps thee most magical moments, the most mysterious ones this time of year, are those in the final moments before Father Sun commits to his trajectory. Dawn or dusk, it makes no matter; the glow defies description as thoroughly as the colors defy our naming. How are we to find words adequate to such beauty?
The answer, I think, is that we are not; the spirits of the cosmos intend some things to be beyond our grasp, beyond our ability to label and thus diminish them. In our way, so it is with ceremony, and with medicine; no mere mortal understanding can describe the fullness of their reality.
And that, perhaps, is one of the lessons of these cold dark days: In the low light of winter, we are granted the momentary medicine of beauty wholly beyond our grasp.
It is our task to appreciate it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
